You're Allergic to WHAT?!? (with disgusting medical-grade pictures!)

I'd have to say that it all started with the new pool and the mysterious, magical green water that we filled it with.

We have been saving our pennies for several years in order to buy a nice pool.  I have found out the hard way that pools scavenged from the local dump tend to be not everything that one desires in the way of summertime enjoyment. They tend to leak and collapse at inopportune moments. Like when you're languidly floating around in them, drinking a delicious rum-based beverage of immeasurable joy, listening to Bob Marley singing about three little birds. The sun is shining on your gently smiling face. There isn't anything in the world but you, your drink, and Mr. Marley. And, it appears, a grave structural flaw in your pool. And then, you're sprawled across your soggy lawn, wondering what happened to your drink.

If you ever find yourself in this position, refrain from the real, and very understandable, urge to salvage your drink by slurping up the pool water that is slowly disappearing into the grass beneath you. The chlorine and the ants will give even the best drink a slightly off flavor.

I speak from experience, people.

So, a couple years ago, we upgraded to one of those ring-top pools purchased from that recognized dealer of pool-related excellence, Toys-R-Us. The box, covered with pictures of happy families, frolicking in the crystal clear water of their new pools, promised that the entire thing could be installed in minutes.

I mixed my rum-based beverage of immeasurable joy and opened the box, which failed to mention that you can also measure the age of the universe in minutes if you are so inclined.

Minutes stretched into hours which stretched into days. The ice cubes melted in my drink. My children stood by in their bathing suits, helping me along by asking every 30 seconds if the pool was ready yet. They clearly thought that I was hogging all the fun as I spent 3 days in the blistering sun, digging up our lawn and wheeling in hundreds of pounds of sand so we could have a somewhat level place to put the pool. It was fun, of course, but not as much fun as I made it look like.

I was thrilled to discover that after digging up the grass, leveling it off, and hauling in all the sand, the pool itself did actually unroll and inflate in just a few minutes. Then, with our weak and impoverished well, it took another week to fill it up enough for the filter to work.

Which it didn't.

So we bought a bigger, better, faster, shinier filter that cost more than the entire pool.

Then the pool popped.

So we started saving and finally bought a brand-new, real pool with a real filter and had it installed by real pool installer guys complete with butt cracks hanging out of their pants so you know they're official.

This is not the disgusting picture I mentioned in the title. That's coming up later. This is a bonus disgusting picture.        You're welcome.

But before the installers could work their magic, the dump truck fairy had to deliver 10 tons of stone dust to my home.

No, actually, I'm not exaggerating.

And, as an added bonus, when the installers were finished, there were 5 tons left over. Anybody need some stone dust? Bring a wheelbarrow and a shovel.

So the pool went up and it got filled with three giant tanker trucks full of water. This was exciting to watch. See how excited I am?

The water had a delightful greenish cast to it that made the entire pool look like a magical mermaid swimming grotto, where mermaids splash and play in the tropical sun.

Or a nasty stagnant swamp, if you lack imagination like some people in my family whom I am married to.

But, through the magic of chemical enhancement, the water cleared up overnight.

And the kids, who were vibrating with excitement, jumped into the pool.

Tori's pink floaty pony popped 2 seconds after this picture was taken.

Alex wished it was just a popped pony for him.

You will notice how happy Tori looks. She looked much less happy two minutes later when her pink, inflatable pony suffered a tragic blow-out, rendering him useless. You might also notice the look of unbridled horror on Alex's face. That look was mirrored on all our faces just a few short minutes later when Alex emerged from the pool looking like this.

This is the disgusting picture I was talking about.

And this is another bonus one. See how good I am to you people?

I almost spilled my drink, but because of past experience, I now use a sippy cup for all my rum-based beverages of immeasurable joy.

These hideous hives covered much of his torso and, naturally, we were deeply concerned.

What if whatever horrible disease he had contracted had contaminated the sparkling clean pool water, ruining it for the rest of us?

The hives disappeared a few minutes after they appeared. Seeking a scientific explanation for what was going on, we tossed Alex back in the pool. Because that's how scientists work, I believe. A result must be repeatable. And it was. The hideous hives reappeared.

And I still didn't spill my drink.

Because I had finished it by then.

We spent two days trying to figure out what was happening. Nobody else was reacting to the water like that. Mostly, the rest of us were reacting by splashing and swimming and playing and assuring Alex that he really wasn't missing much because the pool wasn't actually even that much fun, really.

In between swims, I spent many hours poring over medical sites on the internet, a habit I do not recommend to anyone for any reason. You start looking for information on hives and suddenly you find yourself diagnosing it as a rare flesh-eating bacteria that will totally ruin the pool for everyone.

Also, I do not recommend that you do any sort of image search for full body hives if you have a tasty beverage in your mouth. Or if you ever want to eat again.

I searched and searched until I found something that perfectly matched Alex's symptoms:

Cold Urticaria

He is allergic to cold.

Go ahead. Look it up.

A carefully performed in-home medical procedure (a phrase I have never used in reference to myself before) involving an ice cube and Alex's extreme discomfort for 5 minutes reproduced the hives brilliantly in the exact spot where the ice cube had been.

A trip to the doctor the next day confirmed the results.

"Gonna be a long summer for you, buddy," the nurse said to him.

"Can I have the cool new pool float that mom bought you?" I asked.

It turns out that his case is a mild one and the hives can be easily controlled with a dose of anti-histamine before he gets in the pool.

But he can't go to the drugstore by himself.

And I still want that pool float.

What Would You Do For $112.50?

We were just sitting down to a delicious dinner (homemade soup with crunchy homemade sourdough bread, should you be curious) when the phone rang.
"Let the machine get it," I mumbled, soup dribbling down my chin and on to my lap.
Conversation ceased at the table as we listened to the answering machine, curious about who would be so bold as to interrupt our tasty dinner.
"Hey Marty. It's Steve. So, I'm wondering... What would you be willing to do for $112.50?"
I excused myself from the table, soup still dribbling from my lips, and raced to the phone.
The question really is, "What would I NOT do for $112.50?"
It was actually the precise amount, including that provocative fifty cents that intrigued me so much.
If Steve had asked "What would you do for a hundred bucks?" I probably would have finished my soup before returning his call.
But $112.50?
An amount like that warrants immediate and undivided attention.
As it turned out, Steve was inviting me to participate in a performance he had booked.
For the following afternoon.
My buddy Steve is very kind and generous about inviting me to some of the many musical extravaganzas he regularly performs. My suspicion is that he enjoys watching me squirm when, mid-performance, he turns to me and whispers, "You haven't heard this next song before because I just wrote it this morning. I haven't got all the words or the structure of the song totally worked out yet, but just play along. It'll be fine."
Steve is a hardened, grizzled veteran musician who can easily and competently operate under such conditions. I, by contrast, am a hack who occasionally plays the drums for my own personal satisfaction or to annoy my neighbors.
The gut-wrenching panic I feel during these moments on stage with Steve is generally its own reward.
But now he was offering $112.50!
With only one song in the entire set that I had never played before, the performance was much easier and less stressful than normal.
But that's because Steve was using the performance as a clever ploy.
He had asked me to arrive at his house a few hours before the performance because he had a new song that he was working on and wanted me to play the drums for him.
At the recording studio.
In two days.
A song I've never heard before? At the studio? In two days?
No problem.
We sat in Steve's living room and he went over the song, stressing the fact that it was going to have a sort of Bo Diddly kind of feel to it. Rock and roll with a chunky sort of back-beat.
No problem.
We practiced it a few times and it seemed to go well, which really should have served as a sort of early warning to me.
I dutifully arrived at the studio at the appointed hour, expecting a fun-filled afternoon of pain, suffering, and humiliation.
Possibly followed by pizza.
As it turns out, there was no pizza, but the pain, suffering, and humiliation I had expected were nothing compared to what I actually experienced.
Steve breezed into the studio and cheerily announced, "So, I've been rethinking this song and I think it may be better if we forget about the Bo Diddly thing and go with a reggae sort of feel. What do you think?"
"Did you bring Jamaican rum?" I asked.
Steve chuckled warmly and ignored my plea, evidently imagining that I was joking.
Steve played his new reggae version of the song and I tried valiantly to think of WWBMD?
What Would Bob Marley Do?
Of course, the answer to that is obvious, but was entirely out of the question.
I've never been particularly proficient at playing island beats on the drum set.
I trudged into the recording room and spent the entire afternoon proving that fact to everyone at the studio including the unprecedented tour group that wandered through the studio at the very apex of my suffering.
Seriously.
A tour group.
"What's that whimpering heap over there in the corner?" asked one of the people.
"Oh, that? That's just a drummer. He'll be fine." came the answer before the tour wandered away.
Six and a half hours after we had arrived, my 3 minutes and 30 seconds of drumming was all recorded.
I woke Steve up from where he was having a restful nap on the studio's luxurious leather couch, and we made our way homeward.
Next time, I'll think very carefully about what I might be willing to do for $112.50.
And then I'll pick up the phone anyway.

(The video is actually from a previous recording session with Steve. I couldn't bear to share the pain of this most recent one.)